Do you mean Washington D.C. (which is technically a district, not a state)? Because I can’t imagine what Washington proper would have done to have gained the attention of anyone in the UK. Washington’s the one on the Pacific, and DC is on the Atlantic.

Unconditional = you have the required grades to enter this university, so you could basically quit school until uni starts if you wanted.
They’re hella rare because if people skive off the rest of the year they enter uni as idiots.

@D_S We aren’t aiming for scriptwriting like certain groups that get A-tier reviews from you, while they fuck with people’s perception of the show due to “heavy editing”; we’re aiming for accurate translations — turning the Japanese into English without unnecessary loss in translation, so fix your review if you don’t want to misguide the readership.

Look, I’m not “misleading” anyone. You just don’t understand how to translate. I get it if you want to keep certain words in Japanese. That’s totes fine and is up to your localization preferences. But when you’re fucking with the grammar of sentences and coming up with lines that no human would ever say in English… well, that’s not acceptable. It’s no longer a translation preference by that point; it’s a mistake. Making lines read nicely is an entirely necessary “loss” in translation.

You’re one of those people who argues that “hai” should always be translated to “yes”, aren’t you?

Look, the point of a translation is to get across what was said and what was meant from the source language to the target language. Direct, word-to-word, grammatically matching translations may get across what was said, sure. But do they convey how it was said? Do they convey the context? Do they make sense to native speakers of the target language? Fuck no, they don’t.

If translations were just about matching words, then Google Translate would have been perfected as soon as language dictionaries were added to the database.

Since I assume you’re the TL for this project (judging by your shitty English), I have to ask if the line sounded natural to you in Japanese (assuming you’re qualified enough to judge that, which I strongly doubt). And if it did, my next question is, necessarily, why didn’t the English line sound natural as well?

If you want a translation to be accurate, you need to change the sentence structure from Japanese to English. Or did you think that translating each word in a conversation is the same as translating the conversation? The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Or, by “accurate,” did you mean “the least amount of changes to the original language?” I think the word you were looking for in that case is “lazy.”

And once again we see that mastery of the target language almost always trumps mastery of the source language when it comes to translation… barring the input of a highly capable and motivated editor, at least.

I never said that the target language was /not/ important. I merely question your and his dismissal of the importance of the source. As I said, beautiful bullshit is still bullshit. You need to first know what you have to convey, and then worry about how to effectively convey it.

I was speaking in general terms, not about this release. Perhaps I should have made that clear. My response was entirely directed at Uichan’s comment; the quality (or lack thereof) of the release being reviewed did not factor into anything I said. The analogy may also have been too kind to the clumsy but “technically” accurate translation; we can forget it then.

In any case, you are twisting my words and responding to a strawman. I reiterate that I wholeheartedly agree that the target language is important. I am simply disagreeing that the source language is unimportant, or far less important than the target, as Uichan seemed to imply.

Of course it’s important, but I see more value in a TL who is capable of expressing what it is he understands about a show, rather than one who’s all “Guys, I totes understand this, but it’s just completely impossible to turn into English, so I can’t tell you what it means. I’m sorry, you baka gaijins.”

Of course, all other things being equal, the best translator is the one who can most effectively communicate the content of the original.

But Uichan didn’t say “all other things being equal”. He said, “mastery of the target language almost always trumps mastery of the source language when it comes to translation.” Perhaps we have different definitions of “mastery”, but I find the implications of that statement to be hard to agree with.

It sounded to me like he meant writing well in the target language could /compensate/ for poor understanding of the source. Which is why I said beautiful bullshit is still bullshit.

Not to mention, from my experience, it’s pretty foolish to assume that your average fansub translator “totes understands” the original and is simply incompetent at expressing it in English. You seem to take it for granted that the quality of a script depends largely on the competence of the English. If you ask me, a lot of groups need to work on learning Japanese first.

Sorry if it seemed as though that was my implication. Notice, though, how I never stated that ‘poor understanding’ of the source language was acceptable or even sufficiently substituted for by skillful embellishment…

Also, I did mention ‘mastery’. You can be able to translate a lot of things in a language without having mastered it. Mastery doesn’t come unless you were born into that language or you really study hard and immerse yourself in it. Really, all that’s strictly needed is a good understanding of the source language’s grammar. A good dictionary will have you covered for vocab.

So grammar has you covered? Nuance and cultural context don’t matter? Understanding when a character is being sarcastic, being polite, being sarcastically polite? Having a grasp of speech registers and dialects? Knowing what a character means when she asks, “Do you want to use the shower?”

There is no such thing as translating only a language without accounting for adapting the cultural context.

Firstly, I think we at least agree on the fact that a successful translator needs to be fairly advanced in both source and target languages (and to be fair, I don’t recall you discrediting the importance of the latter). My point was that if you had to choose which one would be their native language, the target one would be better than the source one (I didn’t quantify that advantage, though, for the record).

Second, your point on the importance of cultural knowledge in translation is completely valid. In fact, I should have known better than to exclude it from the picture, seeing as that’s very instrumental to me as a translator.
I was expressing my opinion as a translator who is native in his target language and has not yet mastered his source language (obviously English and Japanese, respectively). So from my own experience (the better part of a decade), a solid foundation in Japanese grammar, and culture is sufficient to produce quality subs for most anime, even with a limited vocab. It may take a lot longer at times, but it’s better than the reverse.
Finally, I have to disagree with your observation that most groups need more training in Japanese than in English. The majority of bad scripts I see (often ‘professional’ goddamn scripts) suffer from translations that are indeed accurate on a technical level, but are so clumsy that they either kill the mood or leave the viewer confused.

I want to reply to this, but I feel like no matter what I say, Lyger000 is just going to twist my words into something that I didn’t mean like he keeps doing to Uichan.

I don’t want to get into this argument, but I just want to point out that a dictionary, by definition (haha, get it?) will indeed cover you for vocabulary, as Uichan said. I don’t know why anyone would say “You’ve got to be shitting me” to that. Who the heck would use a dictionary that DOES NOT cover you for vocab? I certainly wouldn’t.

Uichan never mentioned nuances, contexts, sarcasm, vocal abilities, dialects, or bathroom hygiene. I don’t even know why one would claim that he discredited any of those things.

The bottom line, is that Lyger000 is saying, “you should have a very, very powerful grasp on your source language”… Nobody said otherwise. Uichan understands that, Dark_Sage understands that. There’s no reason to argue here. Uichan is expressing that “you should have a very, very powerful grasp of your target language”… I’m sure everyone understands that too. I don’t know why Lyger keeps bringing in other arguments, but the sole point made, originally, was that while a mastery of both languages is important, if one mastery had to be to a greater extent it should be in the target language.

So everyone here is making valid points. Lyger is just misunderstanding what Uichan and Dark_Sage are saying. Everyone can go home now. (As a side note, make sure you understand what your conversational partner means, before you attack them. It’s very important.)

I will probably wait for the BD release with the official subs to archive WCW, so far neither FFF or W-N has made a truly well-done release (both have more derps in both the OP/ED and scripts than CR-HS)